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Nighthawk recorded two sessions in 1964 and 1965 under interesting circumstances. In 1964 he recorded for Willie Dixon to interest UK promoters with touring lesser-known Chicago artists. These sides were issued on UK Decca in 1966 on the album Blues Southside Chicago. Nighthawk cut two songs for this session: "Merry Christmas" and "Lula Mae." The latter was a 1944 Tampa Red cover and shows that even at this late session the influence of Tampa Red still loomed large. Mike Leadbitter discusses the aim of the record in his liner notes: "This album was recorded in Chicago's Southside by Willie Dixon with one aim in mind — to provide the English enthusiast with blues played as they are played in the clubs, without gimmicks and without interfering A & R men. This album is not intended to be commercial in any way."³⁶

In a 1977 interview pianist Henry Gray recalled this session: "I remember, in 1964, Willie Dixon was asked by an English company to produce a couple of so-called Southside Chicago sessions. Wolf was not personally interested but he induced me to go and support some of the artists chosen by Dixon...Poor Bob Woodfork, Robert Nighthawk, Shakey Horton. That was issued on British Decca label. Yeah, I think it was representative of the kind of music we were playing in the Southside clubs at that time."³⁵

Nighthawk made an appearance at the First Floor Club in Toronto in 1965. John Norris, writing for Coda magazine, caught the show and had this to report: "The most impressive aspect of the whole engagement was Nighthawk's magnificent guitar work. He is a virtuoso blues guitarist. There can be no other word for it."¹⁰ During this trip he recorded five songs in a small Toronto studio. One of these sides, "Kansas City", was first issued in 2006 on Canada's Stony Plain label on "30 Years of Stony Plain." These sides were previously unknown and do not appear in blues discographies.

Richard Flohil, one of the folks responsible for bringing Nighthawk to Canada, shared these recollections: "Beverly Lewis and I had brought Robert to Toronto to play at a now-vanished Toronto club called The First Floor Club. It was in the basement of a house, and we had already brought Sleepy John Estes with Yank Rachell and Hammie Nixon, and the Muddy Waters Band, to the venue. Beverly paid for the band to go into a small four-track studio in Toronto owned by a chap called Art Snider. It was a very small, very ill-equipped studio — but the place where Gordon Lightfoot made his first records. We cut half a dozen sides, with little idea of how we would use them. On my 70th birthday, Beverly gave me the tapes as a present — and I passed them to Stony Plain. The first thing we did was give the tapes to Peter Moore, a wonderful restoration engineer who has helped Stony Plain on a number of occasions in the past — Peter also produced the Cowboy Junkies' first records. They were extremely damaged, but he did salvage five tracks."

Bob Woodfork